The humble pie is perhaps one of the world’s oldest street foods. A quick survey of global food history finds pies everywhere, from East to West, mirroring the local ingredients, agricultural practices and dietary needs of different cultures. In Greece, pies certainly go way back. There are a few references to pie-making during the Minoan times (2600-1600 BC), but most mentions are from around the 5th century BC onwards, when pies were generally known as plakous. Ancient Athens was particularly famous for its bakeries and pies, especially a cheese pie known as tyronos plakous or tyron artos. They were the main snack consumed by Athenians while listening to public speeches at the Agora or while watching theater.

Twenty years ago, Rio de Janeiro was teeming with food markets: big indoor venues full of stalls where people could go to buy groceries, fresh meat and produce, but also stay for a while to have a drink or two, maybe some appetizers, or even sit down for a meal. As time went by cariocas spent less time in these markets, instead shopping in grocery stores and eating at restaurants; the markets continued to limp forward only because of some strong-willed and stubborn merchants who refused to shut down their businesses.

New York’s street food vendors usually ply their trade where potential customers congregate. On side streets in midtown Manhattan, they set up four and five abreast for the weekday lunch rush. During warm-weather weekends, they feed footballers and their fans outside ball fields in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Red Hook and East New York. In Queens, they do business beside a miles-long stretch of Roosevelt Avenue where it passes through Woodside, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, and Corona; they cluster thickly near station stops of the elevated 7 train. The setting of the D’Angelos Italian Sausage truck presents a dramatic contrast. Monday through Saturday, the truck parks in a long-established spot on Woodhaven Boulevard, on the border between two largely residential neighborhoods, Middle Village and Rego Park, beside the green expanse of St. John Cemetery.

A few intrepid trajinera (gondola) operators sit along the Cuemanco Dock, waiting for tourists to take through the canals. We’re in Xochimilco, the southern-most borough of Mexico City. It’s a popular weekend destination for trajinera rides, when entire extended families float along the canals, drinking micheladas (beer cocktails) and eating elotes (grilled whole corn cobs) sold off canoes. But this weekday morning is quiet. As the morning fog burns off, we set out on a green, motorized trajinera into Xochimilco’s Natural Protected Area. Before it was a preferred weekend getaway for chilangos, Xochimilco was the agricultural heart of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. Our destination is a chinampa, a man-made agricultural plot that “floats” on the city’s shallow lakebeds.

Dozens of urban legends swirl around the city of Naples – strange stories repeated a thousand times that, somewhere along the line, become credible. One of those urban legends concerns biscotti all’amarena, or black cherry cookies: people often say that they are made from day-old cakes. To create this typical Neapolitan sweet, bakers chop up pan di spagna (sponge cake) – the bit that is supposedly reused – and then mix it with black cherry syrup, cocoa and cinnamon. The mixture is then covered with a short-crust pastry shell and baked as a loaf, after which they’re cut into small rectangles.

The best part of waking up in Istanbul is catching sight of the Bosphorus, followed closely by a breakfast of simit, the popular sesame-encrusted bagel-like Turkish bread. We spotted this simit seller in Üsküdar while on our Born on the Bosphorus walk.

Georgians swear that natural wine does not give you a hangover, but something is keeping us in bed watching superhero series on Netflix and it is not the compelling storylines. Vato Botsvadze, owner of Chacha Corner was also at Zero Compromise yesterday. He will insist in all seriousness that his morning headache was a result of the rain, which stopped just before the greatest party in Georgia started. We’re talking about the eighth New Wine Festival, organized by the Georgian Wine Club, a group of over a half dozen wine enthusiasts who have been at the forefront of developing, promoting and educating people about Georgian wine since 2007, when they turned their internet forum into a blog and started hosting wine tastings across the country.

When I was a little girl, a Popsicle was a big deal. Summertime meant that the ice cream truck, bell tinkling, would trundle through the neighborhood where I lived. After a frantic plea to Mom for money, she counted out coins and I raced to the corner where the rest of the kids were already gathered, waiting for the vendor to dig through his icy case for cherry, lime, orange, or the reviled banana. The odor of amyl acetate (the chemical used for artificial banana flavoring) remains cloyingly in my memory. Remember? Hot summer days made those frozen snacks melt quickly, down childish fingers and the side of the hand, down the wrist and almost to the elbow in sticky trails of blood red and pale green. Nips of the cold treat slid in a chilly track from tongue to stomach, giving a few moments relief from childhood summers’ heat and humidity.

The song “My Way” may be a staple of every karaoke bar in Japan but it’s also a fitting description for the Japanese fast food staple of “curry rice” as served at both Rojiura Samurai Curry and CoCo Ichibanya. One can find four Tokyo outposts of Rojiura Samurai Curry, a Hokkaido curry maker from Sapporo, in Hachioji, Shimokitazawa, Kakurazaka and our favorite, Kichijoji. It seems these Japanese curry masters are fond of opening shops in cool neighborhoods where the locals will appreciate the uniqueness of this favored Japanese dish. Much like ramen noodles, curry rice is adapted from a foreign cuisine as a form of fast food in Japan.

We’d passed Noisette many times in the (not quite) year that it had been open. But whenever we’d walked down those sometimes clamorous blocks of 30th Avenue in Astoria, Queens – not far from a bagel shop, a pizzeria, a comfort-food hotspot and a New Orleans-themed bar-restaurant, whose windows open wide toward the street during happy hour – we’d given little notice to the quiet bakery-café with the French name. That changed during one recent stroll, not long before dark, when a hand-drawn signboard beside the door wished us “Ramadan Kareem” and beckoned us to come inside.

Kapnikarea, a tiny music café-restaurant, takes its name from the Byzantine church nearby in the middle of Ermou Street. The street, dedicated to Hermes – a god of many attributes, including trade, thievery and smooth talking – and thronged with tourists and shoppers day and night, is an unlikely location for this unusual eatery. You might expect it in neighborhoods like Psyrri or Exarchia, where the eccentric is commonplace, but not opposite H&M and in the same zone as Zara and Marks & Spencer. In all fairness, Kapnikarea was there first. And when it opened in 1977, it was an avant-garde sandwich shop, a pioneer in the land of souvlaki and spanakopita. This version of fast food barely existed back then although it caught on fast. Nineteen years later, Dimitris Sofos took over the shop from his father and completely transformed it.

The holiday season is one of the more subdued times of the year in Mexico City. Many people leave the city for vacation or to visit family and friends in other parts of the country. We, however, tend to stick around more often than not, traveling around the city and enjoying the relative peace. That’s how we happened upon Coox Hanal, a restaurant hidden inside a century-old building in the Centro Histórico that specializes in the cuisine of the Yucatán, the peninsula that juts out into the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea like a hitchhiker’s thumb. The adventure began when we trudged up a few flights of stairs to the second-floor landing, where we found the restaurant’s entrance. It, along with the stairwell, was plastered with posters and artwork from the sun-kissed and beach-filled Yucatán.

“Mamma mia!” exclaims our Californian friend, as he tastes a slice of cod carpaccio for the first time. Better yet, let’s call this dish, made by one of the oldest fish shops in Naples, Norwegian stockfish sashimi. We are in Porta Capuana, and Vincenzo Apicella is carefully slicing dried fish (stockfish is an unsalted fish preserved only by cold air and wind) that has been rehydrated. He seasons the very thin fillets simply, with the juice of a fragrant Sorrento lemon, and serves them together with Sicilian green olives. The dish is proof, if it was needed, that good food tastes best when it is prepared as simply as possible.

Considering how much hype has been laden upon it since 2016, when a few galleries moved into some of its former warehouses, you’d think the light-industrial, heavily residential neighborhood of Marvila would already be out of fashion. Yet, step outside the cluster of streets hosting these art spaces, co-working hubs, brewer-bars and the famed cultural center Fabrica Braço de Prata, and Marvila as a whole still feels a long way from being the next big thing. Located between Lisbon’s airport and the river Tejo, this sprawling eastern district is mostly unchanged when you move away from the marginal and towards its heart: the expansive Parque Bela Vista.

About 70 winemakers have set up tables around the perimeter of an old Soviet era sewing factory loft. There are a couple hundred wine lovers, wine freaks and industry professionals packed in here swirling, sniffing and tasting some truly mind-boggling wine. This is the Zero Compromise Natural Wine Fair, a festival celebrating vintages whose grapes were grown organically, with no yeasts or sulfites added in the cellar. This is pure, unadulterated nectar, the way the gods intended wine to be made, and much like Georgians have been doing it for 8000 years. The Fair is the brainchild of the Natural Wine Association, a union of ten viticulturists and wine-makers who are wholly committed to organic or biodynamic methods. We have been looking forward to this day for 365 days, since our first Zero Compromise experience last year, at Vino Underground.